LAUSR

Vocational psychology has devoted limited attention to factors that promote or hinder the career development of musicians. We combined features of social cognitive career theory’s (SCCT) well-being and choice models to examine the experiences of musicians at a formative point in their career development – the first few years of college, during which many would-be musicians either reaffirm or abandon their career paths. Consistent with SCCT, we posited that academic satisfaction and stress would be predicted by favorable levels of self-efficacy, outcome expectations, social support, goal progress, and trait negative affect. We also expected that satisfaction and stress levels would, along with self-efficacy and outcome expectations, predict intentions to persist in undergraduate music majors. Participants were 260 first- and second-year undergraduate music majors. The hypothesized model and a slightly revised version (which added a direct path from goal progress to persistence intentions) produced good fit to the data and accounted well for variation in academic satisfaction, stress, and persistence intentions.